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The defense bar is wonderfully imaginative when it comes to inventing novel defenses for its clients. Some of them actually work, or at least result in diminished charges.

The obesity defense: My client was much too fat to climb fit through the hole in bank was he was digging at the time of his apprehension.

The bigamy defense: My client was going twice the speed limit because as a Muslim he has two wives and was racing back and forth to keep them both happy.

Now, please the court, comes the Jessica Rabbit defense.

Jessica Rabbit was a cartoon character, and excessively voluptuous as only cartoon characters can be, in the popular 1988 movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." So striking -- and bright and loyal to Roger -- was Jessica that one film critic dubbed her, "The thinking man's Farrah Fawcett."

Amanda Knox is an attractive 24-year-old American student in Italy who was charged, along with her Italian boyfriend, with the 2007 murder of Knox's roommate, an English exchange student named Meredith Kertcher.

After a convoluted trial, both were found guilty and Knox sentenced to 26 years. However, new evidence surfaced along with the probability that some of the original evidence had been mishandled. Now Knox and her co-defendant are back in an Italian courtroom faced with the prospect of going free or facing a new trial under more advantageous circumstances.

The prosecution wasted no time in portraying the demure-looking Knox as "a lying, sex-loving she-devil."

Rising to her defense, attorney Giulia Bongiorno invoked a novel defense, referencing when Roger Rabbit was falsely accused of murder and Jessica as his accomplice. (The plot's too complicated to explain. Go rent the movie. You'll love it.)

"Jessica Rabbit looks like a man-eater, but she is a faithful and loving woman," Bongiorno said. He paraphrased a famous line from the movie, Jessica's own explanation for her legal troubles, "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way."

For what it's worth, both Roger and Jessica were cleared and as far as anybody's heard, have lived happily ever after.

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